New to Prox, Reserved resources for Prox os itself?

[Jack Freeman]

Hi folks, just an awesome bloody hypervisor, cannot fathom what I was doing farting around with VB and banging my head unsuccessfully against ESXI!
anyhoo,
(edit* of course I tried googling/rtfm'ing the problem without success)
Prox ve running on my home lab/experimental/educational rig consisting of an '09 hpe dl380 g7 with a pair of hex xeons @ 2.4g with 16g ddr3 ecc and a bunch of assorted sata/sas drives in a mix of configs (yeah yeah, its duff but i'm poor)
and a double header supermicro twin duo with 2x twin opteron hex cores @ 2.4g and 64g of ddr2 ecc and currently a pair of low gb sata drives @7500rpm (yeah yeah, didn't I mention, i'm POOR!!)
my question is thus;
how much of the visible resources showing in prox browser gui should I keep un-allocated to any vm in reserve for hypervisor duties? or is it a matter of anything visible as a resource in the gui is already allowing for the underlying hypervisor demands? also, are there any apps/add ons for prox which allow for more detailed monitoring of hardware? like tems and fans etc?? I use the ILO on the hpe but the super came without the unit and I'm struggling to find a replacement.
Thanks in advance, if you got this far down the page I applaud your determination! if you skimmed the above ^^ text and just read this sentence, you are obviously a sys admin and are far to clever to help me!!! (only joshin, sys admins are luverly peeps, one an all!)

 

[lhorace]

Hello there,

It highly depends, if you are using ZFS, this might help https://serverfault.com/a/569358? Another caveat is how much memory you allocate to VMs and how much memory is available on the host. If you have 8GB host and assigned 4 vms 4GB each. You see the picture? Otherwise, a healthy 2-4GB free. Nevetheless, in my case, being poor as well. As for as storage, the general wisdom I hear is 40 to 100GB free. My hypervisors run just fine to the brim, memory wise though I try keep healthy free space on storage. Noting though, the host will be starve for resources, meaning the WebUi will be slow to access. And background backups may fail, though I haven't experience it.

Cheers.

P.S. You hardware is better than mine, I'm using only consumer grade hardware.

 

[Jack Freeman]

Hello there,

It highly depends, if you are using ZFS, Another caveat is how much memory you allocate to VMs and how much memory is available on the host. If you have 8GB host and assigned 4 vms 4GB each. You see the picture? Otherwise, a healthy 2-4GB free. Nevetheless, in my case, being poor as well. As for as storage, the general wisdom I hear is 40 to 100GB free. My hypervisors run just fine to the brim, memory wise though I try keep healthy free space on storage. Noting though, the host will be starve for resources, meaning the WebUi will be slow to access. And background backups may fail, though I haven't experience it.

Cheers.

P.S. You hardware is better than mine, I'm using only consumer grade hardware.

Ta Horace, most helpful, no I'm using straight lvm at the moment, not strayed into zfs yet, do you think that would be worth considering before my setup gets too mature and established to want to alter major settings? As to that hardware, I tried to remember how much I have spent to date and is substantially less than £500 and I recon far nearer to £300! so costs about the same as a new i3-i5 desktop with fairly weak specs! just gotta loiter in the 'network hardware' auctions on fleabay, have the patience of a saint and set strict limits on what you will pay for anything!! that double header supermicro cost a staggering, jaw dropping, bank emptying £43 INCLUDING SHIPPING!! beat that for 24 cores and 64g ram regardless of how steam powered it may be!

 

[lhorace]

Ta Horace, most helpful, no I'm using straight lvm at the moment, not strayed into zfs yet, do you think that would be worth considering before my setup gets too mature and established to want to alter major settings?

Someone with more experience with ZFS would have more info about that. Personally, the use case for ZFS is that if you find ZFS features useful to you? Personally, I don't see them useful to me. Though I hear ZFS Raid is quite popular, especially in NAS (SAN).

LVM Thin here.

As to that hardware, I tried to remember how much I have spent to date and is substantially less than £500 and I recon far nearer to £300! so costs about the same as a new i3-i5 desktop with fairly weak specs! just gotta loiter in the 'network hardware' auctions on fleabay, have the patience of a saint and set strict limits on what you will pay for anything!! that double header supermicro cost a staggering, jaw dropping, bank emptying £43 INCLUDING SHIPPING!! beat that for 24 cores and 64g ram regardless of how steam powered it may be!

Yeah, patience and timing is key.

 

[Jack Freeman]

Well as a postscript to your suggestions above ^^ I left the servers run down to idle with no VM's active before powering down last night and the readings entirely supported your suggestions. By watching the resting levels a clear baseline for the hypervisor becomes visible in graphic terms I can easily interpret and it looks like given enough headroom prox will use around 4g ram and on my multitude of cpu's around 1-2% of total capacity. Thank you for your guidance it was most informative.